Explosion

Abstract

The concept of explosion in Juri Lotman’s scientific thought originates from an existential experience – the vivid awareness that ‘in life, unlike chess, we cannot predict even two moves ahead’ (letter to Boris Uspenskij, end of January 1984; Lotman and Uspenskij 2016: 573). This conviction led him to investigate the ways in which humans culturally shape the experiences of randomness, unpredictability and creativity inherent in life. Without doubt, Lotman’s encounter in 1986 with Ilya Prigogine’s theory of complex systems (Lotman [1989a] 2002: 135) was instrumental in his theorization of explosion, as demonstrated by his last two monographs, Culture and Explosion (Lotman [1992] 2009) and The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (Lotman [1994/2010] 2013), as well as a considerable and consistent body of essays. However, although it is a concept that essentially identifies the Lotman of the later years, we can find the roots of this horizon of reflection in his early writings. ‘Explosion’ is the tip of the iceberg of a community’s intellectual path – the Tartu School’s noosphere (see Lotman [1982] 2016) – marked by a strong internal evolution within the field of human communication studies: a change of vision that saw the transformation of ‘static models of information theory [. . .] into a fascinating picture of interrelations, conflicts and transcoding’, which, in turn, converted ‘semiotic research into a dynamic portrait of the spiritual life of society’ (Lotman [1983] 2005: 76).1 In this chapter I will address the concept of explosion in relation to two problem areas: knowledge and evolution. 2 I will make use of both theoretical writings and documents such as Lotman’s letters, autobiographical interviews and television lectures for the general public. This array of sources will contribute to showing how his scientific thought, feeding on metaphorical images and ‘explosive’ insights, is inseparable from his aesthetic sensibility and, in general, from real life understood as ongoing creativity...