Among the other members of this school were Boris Uspensky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, Mikhail Gasparov, Alexander Piatigorsky, Isaak I. Revzin, and others.
The term "semiotics" was banned in the Soviet Union at that time, and the researchers used the obfuscated term "secondary modeling systems" (Russian: Вторичные моделирующие системы) coined by Juri Lotman and Vladimir Uspensky, in the name of the Tartu Summer Schools on semiotics..[1] Since the 1980s, the approach of TMSS can be characterized as post-structuralist (highly dynamic and complex), and is connected with the introduction of Juri Lotman's concept of semiosphere and its relation to organicism.
While its ideas were being formulated in the 1960s, an official birth year for the semiotics of culture could be marked as 1973, when Lotman - alongside Vjacheslav V. Ivanov, Aleksandr M. Pjatigorskij, Vladimir N. Toporov, and Boris A. Uspenskij - first published the manifesto "Theses on the semiotic study of cultures (as applied to Slavic texts)".
[2] The Text, considered the foundational tool of the School, is used to view the boundaries of a material creation, experience, occurrence, etc., particularly those things that are culturally integrated or artistic.
Alongside the five authors mentioned, the school had a broad international membership, and amongst this decentralized constituency there is a great diversity in publications covering a wide variety of topics.
A brief timeline may help contextualize: The Tartu-Moscow School of semiotics was formed when a diverse group of scholars joined informally from the 1950s to 1980s to provide alternatives to the regnant Soviet approaches to language, literature and culture.
They subsequently came to treat art works and other cultural artifacts as the products of ‘secondary modelling systems’, that is, as elements arranged according to rules that could be seen as language-like and hence accessible to analysis by the procedures of structuralist linguistics.
It was not a mere chance: the University of Tartu had its own, well-established linguistic school, and, moreover, was always characterized by a high spirit of academic tolerance, an openness to all-Europe cultural trends.
It was co-authored by Juri M. Lotman, Vjacheslav V. Ivanov, Aleksandr M. Pjatigorskij, Vladimir N. Toporov, and Boris A. Uspenskij.
The notion of meaning-generation and amplification and the view on the artistic text as a device that performs a very important and complex work by activating linguistic, cultural, and psychological resources became a key topic in many TMS publications.
The TMS’ initial impetus toward “exact knowledge” in the humanities branched into a whole array of various approaches, developed by the school's participants: bright thinkers whose paths ultimately drifted apart.
Even in the first volume of Trudy po znakovõm sistemam (Lectures on structural poetics 1964), Lotman was quite critical to pure formalist statement and methods.
3rd phase Yet the analysis of a defined object is static, and the need to also take into account cultural dynamics led Juri Lotman to introduce the notion of semiosphere.
Although the attributes of semiosphere resemble those of text (definability, structurality, coherence), it is an important shift from the point of view of culture's analyzability.