Sign-Systems, Symbolist Narration, and the Notion of the Transgressive ‘plastic gesture’. (‘Homo Somatikos’ in Russian Modernist Life-Creation).¹

Dennis Ioffe

University of Amsterdam.

       The conceptual axis of ‘life-creation’ may be uniquely relevant to the Modernist culture in its totality (Schmid 1998; Paperno and Grossman 1994). An interesting creative attitude of a very peculiar character becomes evident during the early developmental stages of historical Russian Modernism. This propensity finds expression in different ways of dealing with one’s personal (life) behaviour in the context of a) Symbolism as the movement of Decadence, and b) the Avant-Garde, including Futurists, Konstruktivists, Suprematists and others.   

The Russian Symbolist Decadents and their successors in the Avant-Garde were taking further the Western (mostly French and English) existing aesthetical paradigms, landing on the remote shores of what I’d like to term as the ‘new somatics’, focused on building up the ‘Homo Somatikos’ of their own culture². As explicated in the ideas brought about by the nascent Russian Revolution, propagating the notions of the ‘life-building’ (zhisnestroitel’stvo) that were used in order to facilitate the emergence of a New (Soviet) Man (Paperno and Grossman 1994).  

The discussion focused on the Russian decadent ‘life-creation’ may be realized through the available memoir-accounts composed by various immediate contemporaries of the ‘decadent milieu’ (Ioffe 2007). To my mind, the grotesque eccentricity of these personae conveys a sign-bearing organization in its foundation. This point is demonstrated in the variety of Modernist life-creating and self-fashioning practices. Such behavioural patterns may be described vis-a-vis the semiotic idea of universal ‘play’ as of fundamental cultural concept (e.g. Johan Huizinga) along with some other additional feature-components of the Modernist creative activity. We enter here into the realms of the total theatricality consuming performative and theatrical ‘masks’, to the turbulent aesthetics of the conceptology of ‘private theatre’ (as developed by Nikolai Evreinov), etc. Special attention has to be paid to the concept of ‘aesthetics of life’ as understood via the prism of a world taken as a universal playground (Ingold 1981: 36-62).    

Symbolism as a historical cultural movement differs in some aspects from the Avant-Garde. Symbolist artists and writers were, in principal, more dependent on the previous cultural milieu, namely Romanticism. One of the major primary figures of Symbolism, Charles Baudelaire, may instantly demonstrate some clear post-Romanticist facets in his personal creative outlook. I’d like to take a step further and propose to grasp the entire axis of literary history of ‘Modernity’ from the classic English Romanticism of Byron (with some interest in German idealist subjects) and the pre-Romanticism of Goethe till the end of Avant-Garde as one mega-unit of cultural habitues (or ‘habitus’) centered around certain common elements such as ‘explosion’, ‘experiment’ or ‘dissatisfaction with the surrounding reality’. 

The first genuine and successful endeavours, which en masse indicated reforming and modifying human life according to the new intellectual and spiritual assumptions, also originate in the age of Romanticism. In agreement with all major Romantic opinion, the primary concern of the Avant-Garde was to radically extend the boundaries of what was then universally accepted as the ‘norm’, according to certain conventional definitions of life, art, and culture. This attitude can be seen as relevant to the many-faced activities of the various groups of intellectuals and artists who were articulating all sorts of radical experiment in their creative activities.

The ideas of Russian ‘Lebenskunst’ were, however popular, not absolutely in the same way relevant to just everyone. The complex problem of the aesthetical organisation of the life-activity entered the operational spheres of a turbulent ‘cultural hero’ (or ‘ikon’) and comes to its unique realisation with the milieu of Russian Silver Age culture. I wish to employ the term of ‘cultural hero’ in the sense of referring to any particularly ‘noticeable’ or culturally active personality, who operated within the studied historical milieu. This was the time of a common attention to the ‘idea of the Self’, the ‘individuation’ process was irreversible and far-reaching (Siegel, 2004). In this epoch – the last decade of the 19th and the first two decades of the 20th century, Russia’s so-called ‘Silver Age’ – there was an unprecedented interpenetration of social and cultural reality, on the one hand, and the personal biographies and identities of writers and artists on the other (Lavrov 1994: 83-121). In a deliberately conscious way writers and poets of the period were trying to adapt their lives to already existing models or created new original biographies, highly aesthetical “artists’ lives”, both in their own works and in real life. Many of them considered their own lives as actual works of art, dressing in a particular way and changing the place they lived into a kind of ‘theatrical’ stage. (Schahadat 2004).

I’d like to propose to approach the semiotic nature of symbolist and avant-garde life-creation in accordance with its most characteristic way of constructing literary texts. This ‘orderly unification’ can be represented by the concept of the “plastic suggestive gesture”³(‘пластический жест’) imbued with abundant innuendo and the productive potential of an impulse used to create novel and unique modernist poetics. Evidently the notion of ‘plasticheskij zhest’ has something in common with the theory of ‘semantic gesture’ as developed in the Prague linguistic school in the thirties. I’m referring here to the basic notion of life or ‘event of life’ understood as ‘text’ with the relevant sign-operation imbued into it. (Ricoeur 1973: 91-117).

In the context of the notion of the ‘plastic gesture’, two protagonists of Russian modernism in general and of symbolism in particular, deserve special attention – Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely. The former carries on the romantic tradition (much in the way Charles Baudelaire was a romanticist while at the same time being an important part of a modernist canon). The latter – Andrei Bely – already anticipates (and, in many ways, transcends) the tell-tale achievements of the historical avant-garde (Bely’s prose is often almost more radical than that of the majority of the ‘proclaimed’ avant-garde writers – consider, for instance, his works Glossolalia, The Christened Chinaman, Kotik Letaev, and Masks, to name but a few) (Lavrov 1994: 83-85). It cannot be denied, however, that both belong wholly to the Russian symbolist literary canon, and specifically to its so-called ‘younger generation’. Especially characteristic of the works of these two authors is the semiotically rich ‘plastic gesture’ that transcends traditional textual boundaries.

In his scholarly essay “A Semiotic Radical of Blok’s Semantics” [Семиотический радикал блоковской семантики] an American Slavist Savely Senderovich (1984: 305-307) writes: “A sign is viewed as a gesture, resulting in three corollaries with major semantic significance. First, it is produced by a persona, and not necessarily a human one: it can be an esoteric, mystical entity perceived as a person or personified as an element… This means that a sign is seen as the means of a living, active communicational strategy. Second, the sign has a dynamic character – it appears and vanishes, one needs to wait for it patiently and grasp it; its existence is closely associated with time, often as brief as a moment. Third, it exists in the visual modality – all the characteristics of its appearance are visual. In this sense, a sign is the opposite of a spoken word and is akin to a pregnant silence…”.(Senderovich 1984: 307).

Senderovich aptly points out that Blok often rhymes znak – “sign” – with zlak – “grain”. A Slavic scholar from U of Cornell notices that: “As we can see, maki (“poppies”) and zlaki (“grains”) are not at all interchangeable – for one thing, they belong in different contexts: poppies are being set aflame (beginning to bloom), while grains wilt (die down). This pair of motifs reveals one of the inner dualities of Blok’s “sign”: its ability to both provide a subtle reference to some ancient secret and to aggressively impose dreadful apocalyptic revelations. Nevertheless, even in the latter function the sign retains its mysterious esoteric character: “Not everyone was reading / The signs at dawn”. In general, no two signs are alike: while sharing many other common features, signs can play two roles, as though oscillating between the two. Changing the motifs (maki – zlaki) within a single semantic paradigm means a partial change in the semantic functions: different situations call for different elements of the paradigm”.(Senderovich 1984: 308).

It is important to stress here the crucial role of ‘sign’ in Blok’s texts as a sui generis, self-sufficient, and independently acting ‘character’. Especially important is its ‘plasticity’ its transcendent capacity to belong in ‘two worlds’, and its overall existential ambivalence. The inner dichotomy of a symbolic ‘literary gesture’ as ‘sign’ is vividly represented in Blok’s verbal texts. (Minc, 2004: 97-98).

The Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics was particularly interested with the sign-systems of the cultural ‘text of behaviour’ (Lotman 1992-1993: 300-319; Lotman1992-1993-a: 369-378). This topic of Russian cultural history may include studies of the creative personal behaviour and its possible semiotic ambiance.  The analysis of cultural sign-systems explicates the creative patterns of personal ‘bodily’ conduct belonging to the different cultural icons of the entire epoch⁴. The Tartu-based scientific school, which originated under the guidance of Yuri M. Lotman, gave to this initial impulse the most adequate scholarly understanding of the relevant sign-structures and hidden meanings dwelling within the pragmatics of authorial behaviour. Lotman suggests dealing with a person’s ‘cultural biography’ as if it were a common sign-system, a ‘text’ sui generis, speaking more concretely (1992-1993-a: 369-378). By coming to terms with this historical phenomenon, only certain specific considerations can be formulated with regard to unique cultural types, such as ‘codes of conduct’, ‘reputation’, and the ‘writer’s biography’. All these characteristics are bound by their direct relation to the way the creative construction of the author’s personal image is being achieved (self-built). These various creative ‘literary masks’ were very popular among these layers of Russian writers and artists (Schahadat 2005; Rippl 1999).

In her important pioneering work ‘The Idea of Text and Symbolist Aesthetics’ (‘Понятие текста и символистская эстетика’), Zara G. Mintz (2004: 98-99) writes: “1. Ideas on the nature of the literary text occupy a special place in the views and work of the Russian symbolists <…> Reality itself is given the properties of a literary text. 2. The universal Text is realized in the ‘texts of life’ and the ‘artistic texts’. The Unity of the Text is juxtaposed with the infinite number of its particular   manifestations.…”.

This has much to do with the deeper particularities of the symbolist worldview as a whole. The Symbolist ‘picture of the world’ is always constructed from two divergent tendencies. In the researcher’s terms it “consists of the establishment of a system of antitheses, organizing the world in terms of space, value, and so on, while the other is directed at reconciling opposites and establishing a universal isomorphism among all of the phenomena of life (‘the world is full of correlations’ – A. Blok)… Finally, it is this very conception of the world as an ‘art-like’ text that explains the origin of the symbolist idea of “life-building”. The “idea of life-building” combines naive utopianism with the pathos of the harmonious persona, historicism, and the “preservation of culture <…>”.(Mintz 2004: 98-99)

The philosophy of life-creation, understood in the broader historical sense as “the art of living” (lifestyle), has been discussed in a series of works by the Berlin philosopher Wilhelm Schmidt (1998). The semiotics of some peculiar forms of ‘masked-behaviour’ will frame my discussion of Modernist authorial ‘Lebenskunst’. One theoretical text by Lotman and Piatigorsky devoted to the problem of ‘sign-mechanisms in culture’ (1971: 144-165) has described the primary semiotic rules responsible for management of paradigmatical cultural fashions and corresponding behavioural multi-functions. The degree of operational semiosis may vary considerably among the self-conscious individuals, being engaged in the aesthetic creation of their specific ‘life-texts’: “When we speak of the semiotics of behaviour we should have in mind, on the one hand, some creation of a ‘behavioural text’, which functions as a meaningful sign in relation to any other text, or, on the other hand, gives thoughtful recognition of certain empirical phenomena (of our environment) as sign-constructions.  This particularly pertains to some conventional sign-system or to any separate reality that in its turn determines the concrete meaning of these phenomena. In each case, we are entitled to speak, respectively, about the two models of semiotic behaviour: pro-creational and analytical. In both types the semiotics of behaviour might vary considerably among the different living personalities”.(1971: 144-165).

The semiotic nature of one’s behaviour depends, therefore, on the culturally-suggestive way this type of ‘text’ is perceived by much of the potential audience related to the cultural hero. In the ‘real time’ of this ‘concretely-happening’ behaviour, the ‘reception’ and ‘perception’ turn out to be possibly as meaningful as the ‘embodied action’ itself. The way the mask was perceived by its audience is equally important as the author’s original personal intention. The principal point, accordingly, is if the ‘mask’ and its creator could be in fact perceived adequately and correctly. And here arises the problem of ‘myth’ and ‘mask’ types of conscience with respect to semiotics.

Lotman and Piatigorsky would go so far as to argue that the self-apperception of each concrete authorial/masked deed (‘event’ or ‘action’) will be dependent upon the way this individual perceives his I-image and how he is engaged in the self-modeling process of ‘mask-creation’. Lotman and Piatigorsky give a good deal of thought to the importance of ‘mask-conscience’ (‘собственное я и сознание маски’) for any process of self-communication of the author and his environments. This particular point might be visualised with the scholars’ own terms, making the idea of ‘outer-perception’ crucially important, elucidating the point of reaching the correct attitude of the contemporaries toward the ‘masked-personality’: “Evidently, the major characteristics of different types of behaviour are controlled by a distinctive dependence on a concrete individual. It is also evident that the self-understanding, i.e. the comprehending of one’s very ‘I’, is determining the general sphere where all the areas of analytical behaviour and, moreover, the generation of this behaviour are cross-meeting and complementing one another. <…> The degree of self-awareness may vary considerably from the point of view of a third observer and that of the second or the first. The semiotical nature of this process of the virtual construction of the ‘I’-image gives its foremost explication in the problem of personal mask”. (1971: 147-150).

The heterogeneous nature of mask-issue could be crucial for a proper understanding of the inner essence of the Russian life-creation subjects and matters. The duality of mask and its complex archaic structure should be named in connection with the mystificational interests of some of the Russian cultural heroes of the Silver Age.The importance of an indigenous ‘mask’ rests on how the person’s solid self-image can thereby be created: “Evidently, the ‘mask’ is needed to an individual, first of all, in order to create the sufficient image of its own ‘I’ in the communication with the Others. The ‘mask’ is, therefore, depicted as some sort of stabilized static appearance hiding all the ever-lasting changes of the core-‘I’. This process resembles the stability of archaic ritual that received its form in all the magnitude of its performing history. Such a ritual and its masks can be seen as a stabilizing element in human society that is regulating all the outer forms of the behaviour of a person inside the community”. (1971: 153).

This suggestive notion of personal (archaic) mask could be relevant for dealing with Lotman’s seminal article “Декабрист в повседневной жизни. Бытовое поведение как историко-психологическая категория” (‘Russian Poet-Decembrist in his everyday life. The day-to-day behaviour as a historical and psychological problem’) (1992-1993: 300-319). A scholarly text, presenting some central considerations with regard to the complex relations postulated between the life-text of ‘the deed’ (postupok) and that of ‘the implied author’. Lotman’s analysis provides a basic research framework to analyze many meaningful elements in one’s personal behaviour and the way they constitute the case-study for any Lebenskunst scholarly effort. Lotman focuses on one of the great Russian poets, Alexander Pushkin, his ‘personal myth’ and the original ‘private-biography’ myth-creating agendas. In the actual behaviour of human beings, the so-called ‘texts of conduct’ may remain eternally ‘unfinished’. He illustrates this further: “The hierarchy of many meaningful elements of behaviour is creating some sort of a sequence: the artistic gesture –> the action –> the text of behaviour. The latter should be understood as a complete chain of the ‘conscious actions’ that is made evident by means of the intention and the palpable result. In the real behaviour of people, the complex and artificially controlled universe of empirical being, these ‘texts of behaviour’ may remain eternally unfinished, transcend their boundaries to merge with some adjacent texts, intersperse with the parallel entities. <…> they always, necessarily comprise a sensible and understandable narratives (‘sjuzhety’) ready to human perception. … Every text of behaviour corresponds to a specific ‘behavioural program’ on the level of intentions.” (1992-1993: 301-303).

With this original theorizing suggested by Lotman comes an important idea of a certain mental ‘gesture’ (a concept that deserves special attention), Tartu scholars utilize it in cultural sciences to understand the initial state for any cultural ‘event’ and, in turn, the ‘behavioural text’. Some possible uses of these ideas (‘cultural event’ and ‘artistic gesture’) will be shown in the coming chapters.For the appropriate ‘siuzhet’ (‘story’ or ‘plot’) of a person’s self-fashioning is behaviour. The ‘ideal horizon’ of it exists on the background; its farthest finalizing, as Lotman takes this point, comes to be crucial for human behaviour concept and understanding. By ‘finalizing’ (‘завершенность’, or as opposite- ‘незавершенность’) I refer to some particular notions developed by Lotman’s elder contemporary Mikhail M. Bakhtin – the Russian cultural theorist who had spoken conversably on the point of potential ‘non-finishabliness’ of a great works of fiction.

Crucial to any adequate research description used for the ‘texts of culture’ is the virtual opposition between the genre-modules of ‘myth’ and ‘narrative’, a problem not neglected by the structuralists of the Moscow-Tartu school. Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky (1972: 282-284) have devoted much attention to this topic when they defined this opposition as ‘descriptive vs mythological ways of description’ (“дескриптивное vs. мифологическое описание”) [descriptive narrative vs. mythological narrative]. By ‘descriptive’ they mean the so-called ‘meta-language’ (such as Modernist experimental ‘literature-about-literature’), whereas the ‘mythological’ (in addition to this meta-textual function) was intended to designate some other text dealing with the same object by certain auxiliary means: “In the first case (the descriptive account) we have a reference to the meta-language, to its specific category or a concrete element of its structure. In the second case (the mythological account) we have a reference to a meta-text, i.e. a text which operates according to meta-linguistic function. <…> Therefore, a mythological description has a mono-linguistic nature, in principle; the objects and subjects of this system are described via the same system, which is built according to the same rules”. (1972: 283).

Reflecting on these notions, the founders of Moscow Tartu school have postulated an idea of a mono-linguistic character of a primary ‘mythological narrative’, which must lay the foundation for many further scientific elaborations of aesthetical or ‘creational’ philosophies of culture or art. The Moscow-Tartu semiologists were insisting on a peculiar ‘poly-linguistic’ character of non-mythological variants of any narrative description and its direct relation to the idea of a mere technical ‘translation’, whereby the ‘transformation-process’ of that sort may be further utilized as a variety of semiotic unfolding for the different subsequent debates that will deal with the literary ‘mythopoetical’ descriptions of the creative and playful ‘texts of behaviour’ which were realized by the ‘physical bodies’ of their authors.

Works cited:

Bachmann-Medick Doris (ed., et al.) 1996
Kultur als Text: die anthropologische Wende der Literaturwissenschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.

Bykhovskaia, I.M. 2000 Homo somatikos: аксиология человеческого тела [Homo somatikos, the axiology of human body], Moscow: Editorial URSS.

Ingold, F.P., 1981    
Kunst- und Lebenstext. Thesen und Beispiegle zum Verhaltnis zwischen Kunstwerk und Altags-Wirklichkeit im russischen Modernismus, in Die Welt der Slaven, Bd.26, pp. 36-62.

Ioffe Dennis G., 2007
Дискурсы телесности и эротизма в литературе и культуре (эпоха Модернизма),[The discourse of somatics and eroticism in literature and culture of the Modernism], Moscow: Ladomir research publishers.

Lavrov, A.V., 1994
Anrei Bely and the Argonauts’ Mythmaking, Creating Life: the Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University, pp. 83-121.

Lotman J.M., 1992-1993
Декабрист в повседневной жизни. Бытовое поведение как историко-психологическая категория [Russian Decembrist in everyday life. Personal behaviour as historico-psychological problem]. In Избранные статьи в трех томах, Talinn: Aleksandra, v.1, pp. 300-319.

Lotman J.M., 1992-1993-а
Литературная биография в историко-культурном контексте. К типологическому соотношению текста и личности автора [Literary biography in historico-cultural context. The role of author’s personality as regards his text]. In Избранные статьи в трех томах, Tallinn: Aleksandra, v. 1, pp.369-378.

Lotman J.M., Piatigorsky, А.М., 1971
О семиотическом механизме культуры [On the semiotic mechanisms in culture]. In Труды по знаковым системам, Tartu, vol. 5, pp. 144-165.

Lotman J.M., Uspensky, B.A., 1973
Миф – имя – культура [Myth-name-culture]. In Труды по знаковым системам, Tartu, vol.6, pp. 282-284.

Mercks K., 1986(2006)
Introductory Observations on the Concept of ‘Semantic Gesture’, Russian Literature, vol. XX-IV (15 November 1986). Revised for the Amsterdam Journal for Cultural Narratology, vol. 3: http://cf.hum.uva.nl/narratology/a06_mercks.html

Mintz, Z.G., 2004
Понятие текста и символистская эстетика [The concept of text and the aesthetics of Russian Symbolism], in her Поэтика русского символизма, Sankt-Petersburg: Iskusstvo, pp.97-103.

Paperno I., and Joan Delaney Grossman (eds.), 1994
Creating Life: the Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Ricoeur, P., 1973
The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text, New Literary History, Vol. 5, No. 1, special issue: ‘What Is Literature?’ (Autumn, 1973), pp. 91-117.

Rippl, D., 1999     
Ziznetvorchestvo oder die vor-schrift des texts. Eine Untersuchung zur Geschlechter-Ethik und Geschlechts-Aesthetik in der Russischen Moderne, Munchen: O.Sagner.

Schahadat, Sch., 2005
Das Leben zur Kunst machen: Lebenskunst in Russland vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundent. Munchen: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.

Schmid, Wilhelm, 1998
Philosophie der Lebenskunst: eine Grundlegung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Seigel, J., 2005
The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.

Senderovich, S., 1983
Семиотический радикал блоковской семантики [Semiotic radical in Blok’s semantics]. In Aleksandr Blok Centennial Conference (ed. By W.N.Vickery and B.B.Sgatov), Columbus:Slavica, pp. 304-322.

References