Barthes and Lotman: Ideology vs culture

Abstract

Despite both being great names in semiotics, Roland Barthes and Juri Lotman have more differences than they share similarities – not only because of their different political and historico-cultural environments, but also because they do not have the same object of study: it is ‘ideology’ for Barthes, and ‘culture’ for Lotman. Thus, there is no intellectual common ground between them, yet comparing them can lead us to a more important question: what is semiotics, and what has structuralism to do with it. The contrast between the two researchers is striking: Barthes, with leftist convictions in a capitalist country, published in Marxist publications, and risked nothing; Lotman, a specialist in Pushkin, had his apartment searched by KGB officers. In the name of semiotics, Bart fought against the alienation of social consciousness, against the oppression of free thought by bourgeois ideology, Lotman tried with all his might to adhere to a high elite culture. Both were subject to constant criticism from conservative forces, both promoted semiotics as a science of the modern era. But the same word, “society”, had incompatible meanings for them: for Barthes it represented a split association of opposing classes, for Lotman it had a romantic flavor of cultural integrality based on a common literary language and literature. Although we do not find a definition of structuralism in any of them, this comparison reveals unexpected aspects of the history of this important trend in the humanities and social sciences, both in France and in the Soviet Union.

Keywords

• structuralism
• marxism
• myth
• semiotics
• language
• society