As one may conclude from the previous chapter, Tartu culturology is, like Lotman’s
“culture,” “full of the splinters of different structures in free motion” (Lotman 1992, 177). It is constituted not by some monolithic structuralist methodology but by the uneasy coexistence of different conceptual frameworks and research perspectives, of which Ivanov and Toporov’s “evolutionary structuralism,” Lotman and Uspensky’s “typological structuralism,” and Lotman’s mature “neo-historicism” are the most developed.
So far, we have seen Lotman’s neo-historicist perspective on culture mostly in his theoretical proclamations, not in his historical research. In this, Lotman’s neo-historicist works differ from Lotman and Uspensky’s (1984, 3-70) coauthored papers, in which they made their name by emphasizing the continuity of Russian history and introducing the structural basis for such continuity, the so called “binary models in the dynamics of culture.”
In their works, Lotman and Uspensky explicitly connect theory and history, and this explicitness adds to the visibility of their statements. Unfortunately, in Lotman’s other historical studies, the connection between his neo-historicist ideas and his historical research is subject to reconstruction.1 In what follows, I attempt this reconstruction and thus reclaim an alternative, and so far underestimated, Tartu paradigm of historical research to the contemporary scholarly use.
In particular, I contend that Lotman’s historical research on early Russian modernity and on what he calls the “theatricality” of the Russian nobility’s everyday life is strongly motivated by the neo-historicist idiom, as developed by Lotman in the 1980s and 1990s. 2 I further demonstrate that Lotman’s historical studies implicitly contain a grounded theory of the emergence of modern personhood and associated institutions in the non-Western world. I try to demonstrate that this conception is intriguing enough to earn Lotman a place in the Western scholarly imagination along with Jürgen Habermas, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault and other prominent theorists and historians of modernity.
Life into Theater: A History of Modern Personhood
Despite relatively local and mixed reception of Tartu cultural semiotics in the West, the categories of “theatricality” and “the poetics of everyday life” (poetika byta) were received favorably by both Russian historians (e.g. Roosevelt 1991; Wortman 1995) and other cultural
1Most of these articles have been translated in Lotman’s section of Lotman and Uspenskij (1984, 71-256).
2 Although the focus of this chapter is the works of Lotman, I occasionally refer to other Tartu and post-Tartu works that I consider significantly “neo-historicist” in their approach. While some of these authors clearly differentiate themselves from the structuralist aspects of the Tartu tradition (e.g.
B.Gasparov 1996a; Zhivov 1996; 2002), others are more hesitant to raise their choices of research framework to the level of abstract conceptual debates (e.g. Leibov 1996; Pogosjan 2001).
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historians (Burke 1991; Greenblatt 1989). This is not an accident. Unlike many other Tartu conceptual contributions, the direction indicated by these two categories has been well within the current trends in Western studies of culture. The microhistorical analysis of human agency and everyday routines, the emphasis on subjectivity and personal self-fashioning and on the local genealogies of modern institutions is only a short list of the concerns that Lotman seems to share with his Western colleagues. In what follows, I will try to demonstrate how, by means of the categories of “theatricality” and the poetics of everyday life (poetika byta), Lotman managed to introduce these, in my terminology, neo-historicist concerns into the very core of his research. This exposition will lay the foundation for assessing the achievements and limitations of Lotman’s, to a large extent, neo-historicist conception of early Russian modernity.
Let me start with Lotman’s understanding of theatricality. This concept first appeared in Lotman’s writings in the mid 1970s, in a series of articles dedicated to theater and theatricality in the everyday life of the Russian gentry in the 18th-early 19th century (Lotman [1973] 1984; [1975] 1984a; [1975] 1984b; [1977] 1984).3 A fruit of Lotman-led seminar on everyday life held in Tartu University in 1972-74, these papers deal with the phenomenon of more or less explicit modeling of political and everyday behavior by the Russian and sometimes European elites on the artistic presentations of reality and history. Lotman argues that the epochs of Romanticism and Neoclassicism, in their own different ways, brought together, closer then ever before, the worlds of theatrical performance and fashion, on the one hand, and the worlds of political ritual and everyday life, on the other.
In short, theater entered life. Theatrical norms invaded everyday behavior: friendship, love, “communing with nature” and even solitary existence. Large segments of everyday life
4—eating, conversing, flirting, etc.—lost their spontaneity but also their relative
“uneventfulness,” their automatic and routine character. Instead, the gentleman of the 18th and especially early 19th century was no longer
a passive participant in the impersonally flowing course of time, for, liberated from everyday life ,he existed as a historical person, himself choosing his type of behavior, making an active impact on the world around him, and either going under or winning through. Viewing real life as a performance not only offered a person the possibility of choosing his type [amplua5] of individual behavior, but also filled it with the expectation that things were going to happen. Eventfulness [(suzhetnost’)], that is, the possibility that unexpected phenomena and turns of events would happen, became the norm…. It was precisely the model of theatrical behavior that, by turning a person into a character in a play [(or, actor, acting agent, deistvuiushchee litso)] (underlined in the original–M.W)], liberated him from the automatic sway of group behavior and of custom (Lotman [1973] 1984, 160).
Described as such, theatricality of everyday life should not be confused with the medieval
“theater state” with its graded hierarchy of prestige and sanctity from highly ritualized, or
“scenic,” life of the court to the practically norm-free social nonbeing of lower class’s daily existence (Geertz 1968, 37-38). The particularity of the historical moment, as described by Lotman, was in the fact that, for example, the Russian imperial court in the 18th century
3 The titles of these articles are as follows: The Theater and Theatricality as Components of Early Nineteenth-Century Culture, The Decembrist in Everyday Life, Gogol’s Chlestakov: The Pragmatics of a Literary Character, The Poetics of Everyday Life in Russian Eighteenth-Century Culture (see translations in Lotman and Uspenskij 1984).
4 Bytovaia zhizn’, or simply byt, from the verb “to be” (byt’).
5 From French emploi. Amplua means adopted role, or style of behavior, in contrast to ascribed role.
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became just one of several horizontally juxtaposed life-scenes of the nobleman’s life, along with the civil or military service and the ball, the barracks and the estate, the capital(s) and the province, the company of ladies and that of men (Lotman [1973] 1984, 152). The Russian gentleman of the time became an actor in a number of “plays.” He behaved differently in these plays, according to their distinctive, and often incompatible, plots, genres, front- and backstage, audiences and criteria of outstanding performance (Lotman [1977]
1984, 236-237). In contrast to the “theater state,” which symbolized the social hierarchy, the invasion of theater into life led to the lowering of the hierarchical barriers among, at least, elite actors. Lotman writes that Napoleon was just a person of his time when he modeled his imperial court on “the norms established in eighteenth-century French theater for representing the courts of the Roman emperors” (1990, 60).
Furthermore, Lotman de facto differentiates two types of theatricality, a more historically specific phenomenon and a more universal phenomenon, which recurs in history from time to time. The latter type of theatricality, of simply “performativity,” can be defined as a phenomenon of turning unmarked and unremarkable background of what we tend to consider as notable events into a set of significant events in their own right. These kind of
“poetization” and “mythologization” of certain segments of everyday life, for instance rural life or food, is in the core of some cultural styles like Baroque or Romanticism, as opposed to Classicism and Realism ([1973] 1984, 159).
In contrast, the former type of theatricality is more historically specific. As the long passage above suggests, it has to do with modernity and the character and history of modern subjectivity (cf. Elias 1978; Foucault 1977). Indeed, for Lotman and his colleagues, theater is both a metaphor for, and an important practice of, the establishment of the conditions for the peculiarly modern, or “mature,” in Kant’s words, sense of personhood. As Maria Pliukhanova, the Tartu University medieval historian, pointed out, “The ability to temporarily take someone’s role and name and not lose one’s individuality is the basis of the art of acting, as well as a trait of a self-determining individuality, a result of the ability to see oneself from the outside” (Pliukhanova 1982, 88).
For Lotman, subjectivity (or “personality,” “personhood,” lichnost’, individual’nost’), is not a ready-made substance with fixed attributes. “The actual notion of ‘individuality’ is not primary or self-evident. It depends on the means of encoding” (Lotman 1990, 234). This statement implies the multiplicity of culturally defined types of personhood. For instance, the medieval Muscovite concept of personhood was defined by the degree of “honor,” or the
“place on a social ladder and his or her proximity to the tsar” (Reyfman 1999, 35; cf.
Kollman 1999; Lotman 1967c). The individual’s agency depended on his or her awareness of her place within the hierarchy of social ranks.
Hence, Lotman allows for multiple historical types of individual agency. Yet, what sets apart his notion of the “modern Russian personhood” is its consistently “theatrical”
relation with oneself, or attitude to one’s own body, behavior, emotions and thoughts. It is not an accident that, like Baudelaire and Foucault (1978), Lotman singles out the “dandy” as a exemplar of such a theatrical actor.6 What distinguishes dandyism from other forms of agency is the very fact of adopting a certain attitude in respect to oneself and the world.
Instead of just accepting one’s social definition, the dandy detaches his self and the roles he plays and thus transforms these roles into amplua’s, i.e. objects of awareness, elaboration and manipulation.
6 Notably, even the wordings of Foucault’s and Lotman’s accounts are similar. If Foucault (1978) focuses on “the asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art,” Lotman defines theatrical life as a life “raised to the level of high art” (1987, 26).
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Theatricality, in Lotman’s definition, is “a change in the degree of conventionality in behavior” (Lotman [1973] 1984, 150). It is precisely in this change, or rather constant alternation (smena), or “reincarnation” (perevoploshchenie), that the individuality and uniqueness of the self comes to the fore and establishes itself. One of Lotman’s primary examples of such self-invention is Nicholas Karamzin’s narrative persona in his 1790s travelogue on his trip around Europe. In this novel, Karamzin portrays an image of a young Russian nobleman who, while encountering various people, milieus and circumstances, tries on various available masks, like “a sentimental young man,” “a fop” (shchegol’) or “a pedant.” According to Lotman’s interpretation, Karamzin’s main literary achievement is the naturalness with which his hero manipulates these often incompatible masks. In effect, the reader gets a clear sense that all these roles and masks “are combined in one and the same personality” (Lotman 1987, 24). By this very act of combining and alternating, the personality of the main hero/author establishes it as its own invention, as a realization of the Enlightenment project in its Kantian sense. Lotman argues that this success made Karamzin’s travelogue not only one of the first widely-read Russian novels but also a pattern for individual self- fashioning for the upcoming generations of Russian writers and readers. It played a crucial role in the formation of the modern reading public, an ethos of a modern writer and, ultimately, in producing “the new Russian cultural (or ‘cultured,’ kul’turnaia) personality” (Lotman 1987, 29).
The dandy was not just a product of an aestheticizing reaction to modernity characterized by the growing speed and superficiality. Lotman describes the dandyish attitude as a particular case of the larger transformation of the everyday life into the analogue of art.
To be modern was to ”establish the variety of behaviors and their alternation as a norm” of a distinctive theatricalized lifestyle in which life is a realization of specific poetics, the poetics of everyday life (poetika byta) (Lotman [1975] 1984a, 80).
To speak of the poetics of everyday behavior amounts to claiming … that certain forms of ordinary daily activity were consciously oriented towards the laws and norms of literary texts and were lived through as direct aesthetic experiences (Lotman [1977] 1984, 231).
Poetika byta refers to cases when historical actors deliberately turn their everyday life into “a text arranged according to the laws of specific plots” and thus made their lives’ codes
“crackable” by means of reconstructing these plots. Yet, this textualization of life also implies its authoring and deautomatization. We can say that life evolves from the myth to the novel. Indeed, by putting forward, or foregrounding, the composition of one’s life-text, a historical actor transforms her life from uneventful everyman’s sequence into an exciting narrative open to different closures both by readers and the author himself. In this sense, poetika byta is opposite to the “prose” of daily life into which “a man is frozen … like Dante’s sinner into the ice of Caina” (Lotman [1973] 1984, 159). Guided by such “poetic”
attitude, human behavior becomes self-consciously ironic play with codes, conventions, stereotypes and various cultural references.
In short, poetika byta is a kind of play placed in the center of everyday life. As we know from previous chapters, play(ing), not a chess-like game, is one of the basic idioms of Lotman’s semiotics and his theory of the text, in particular. Lotman’s “play” “consists in the fact that different meanings of the same (textual) element not just coexist statically but
‘flicker’” (Lotman [1970] 1998). To play is to be simultaneously within and outside of the situation. To play is to translate, i.e. to engage in what Lotman has called the “impossible translation” between different codes, texts, cultures, life domains and human persons.
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Although Lotman works out his conception of play mostly on the material of art (paintings, film, literature), poetika byta proves to be a vehicle of extending Lotman’s ideas on play toward larger and, presumably, less creative domains of daily life. In effect, it turns out that the mundane existence is not devoid of unpredictability and openendedness, agency and choice, individuality and improvisation. “An acute awareness of the possibility of other meanings,” the key feature of artistic play, can also be found in daily life (Lotman [1970]
1998). These insights animate Lotman’s and his colleagues’ multiple analyses of self-presentations and life-constructions of iconic cultural and political figures (Pushkin, Karamzin, Radishchev, Chaadaev, Alexander I), literary heroes (Khlestakov from Gogol’s Inspector General) and “mass” members of the gentry’s salons and revolutionary societies (including some distinguished women). Furthermore, in his TV lectures delivered in 1986-89, Lotman provided examples of the “poetic” analyses of the “theatrical” aspects of a large variety of everyday practices and objects, starting with civil service and family life rituals to parades, fashions, duels, architectural designs and card games (Lotman 1994a; 2003).
Excited about the cases of crossing the boundaries between art and life, Lotman, however, emphasizes the difference between theatricality and carnival. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival is accompanied by the reversal of all hierarchies and the dissolution of social roles and distinctions (Bakhtin 1984). In implicit opposition to contemporary “counter-cultural” interpretations of Bakhtin (Kristeva 1969), Lotman argues against collapsing together life and art, as well as playful (poetic, theatrical) and “serious” attitude to the world.
His point is that this very opposition “gives meaning and semiotic value to the mutual displacement” of these categories (Lotman 1992, 75). “It is precisely because the life of theater differs from everyday existence that the view of life as spectacle gave a man new possibilities for behavior” (Lotman [1973] 1984, 160). That is, the point of any play, artistic or daily, is not only the transgression of various borders and norms but also, through this transgression, their actualization as no longer taken-for-granted but conscious norms of “my”
behavior. In Lotman’s view, once the norm loses its power altogether, play withers and the new norm, often more oppressive than its predecessor, reigns supreme.
Lotman seems to be particularly irritated by his French and Anglo-American colleague’s fascination with Rabelaisian carnivalesque “body in the act of becoming”
(Bakhtin 1984, 17). He protests against what he considers “counter-cultural” dissolution of the modern subjectivity into an empty signifier behind the “intertextuality” of the traces of the other. The “theatrical” behavior of such, in Lotman’s view, quintessentially modern actors as Pushkin or Karamzin is not a sign of them being split or multiple personalities.
The aesthetic, game-playing essence of this kind of behavior lies in the fact that when he became a Cato, a Brutus, a Pozarskij, a Demon or a Melmoth, and started behaving in accordance with the part has assumed, the Russian nobleman never stopped being simultaneously a Russian nobleman of his time, no more and no less (Lotman [1973]
1984, 150)
Without preserving both identity and distinction between the Self and its multiple roles, the play loses its intrigue and unpredictability, and thus stops being “theater”. Theatricality, in Lotman’s picture, may be a way of problematizing certain roles precisely by showing them as just roles. Yet, by foregrounding the “production” of the self, the theatrical subject did not just dissolve it into the traces of the other but established itself by distancing from its roles.
Hence, Lotman’s implicit debate with French (post)-structuralists and, to a certain extent, Bakhtin stretches into his conception of everyday theatricality. He is interested in theatricality as a mechanism of personality-formation, not its dissolution. His point is that theatricality provides the most revealing case of the self-making characterized by the
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dialectics of unpredictability of the play and the structuredness of the available resources.
Theatricality also provides a field in which this self-making takes place. Overall, it is a case of what Bakhtin calls the “authoring” of one’s life.
Whatever significant this concept of theatricality may be by itself, I am particularly concerned about its contribution to our understanding of the inter-cultural contact, especially the one under the conditions of the “civilizing process” of modernity. However, here, Lotman sends conflicting messages. Based on the bricolage of major trends in Lotman’s theorizing, Lotman’s studies of early modern Russian culture simultaneously provide a further insight into the heterogeneity of his thinking and offer an intriguing formwork for approaching modernity and identity as non-linear, emergent and performative processes.
Playing Modern is Being Modern
The main ideas and findings of the perennialist semiotics of the dual models in Russian culture, as summarized in chapter six, are based on Lotman and Uspensky’s studies of the medieval, or Muscovite, period of Russian history. Yet, Lotman’s own expertise and passion lied elsewhere, in the first half of so called Petersburg period, between approximately 1700 and 1850. Commonly perceived as a start-up of intensive Westernization and modernization of Russia, this period is a profoundly contested issue in Russian historiography. The Slavophil and nationalistic interpretations of this period portray it as a radical break with the
“authentic national tradition.” On the contrary, the Westernizers saw the Petrine reforms as a powerful effort to bolster modernization already on the way.
“authentic national tradition.” On the contrary, the Westernizers saw the Petrine reforms as a powerful effort to bolster modernization already on the way.